I’m not sure when my libido first began to decline. It was probably during the pandemic, so it went unnoticed – like much else. Given that I was stuck indoors, newly divorced, in a one-bed flat, with no garden, and only allowed out to walk for one hour a day in the driving sleet, I didn’t really clock that I wasn’t getting a lot of action. My main concern was not committing suicide through love-grief and loneliness. Also, I cooked several new turbot recipes.
Then the tides of plague retreated and that is when I realised. Something in me had changed: and it was the ‘dogs of lust’, as John Betjeman called them in ‘Senex’, his fine poem about age and desire. The dogs no longer barked, loudly, 24/7, driving me to distraction. Sometimes they went entirely quiet.
Perhaps I should have expected this. I was by this point nearly 60. Plenty of my friends had already announced that they were no longer as hot to trot as in days of yore. Yet for me it came as a surprise, and a peculiar surprise: a weird mix of sadness, calmness, lucidity, resignation, cheerful country walks, forlorn and yearning memories at 6 a.m., and a new appetite for work. Certainly, more spare time for work.
To understand my experiences you need to understand my history. I have – I had – a seriously powerful libido. Despite entire years spent whacked on heroin (killing all desire) and other years confounded by impotence (performance anxiety), I’ve enjoyed a great deal of sex with a large number of women, and one failed attempt with a man.
The ‘dogs of lust’ no longer barked, loudly, 24/7, driving me to distraction
How much exactly? Every batsman checks his score towards the end of his innings, just as every man and woman, at some late point, counts the number of sexual partners. For me that total is 350. I used to think this was normal until a few years ago, when I asked a friend, who I presumed lived a life like mine, how many women he’d slept with. He answered ‘eight’. I thought he was joking and then realised he was serious and I burst out laughing. Eight?!
But then I looked up the data and realised my friend is the normal one, and I am the freak. Eight sexual partners in a lifetime is around the median for British males. My 350 is very definitely not.
For clarity, about 250 of these women have been sex workers, and I have statistically purist friends who officiously opine ‘you can’t really count them’. But even if you don’t count them, that still leaves 100 women who agreed to couple with me. So it is still pleasing.
Also pleasing is my ‘Fellini Room’. If you don’t know what a Fellini Room is, that’s understandable, because I only invented the concept six hours ago and I haven’t told anyone yet. But the gist is this: in Federico Fellini’s film 8½ there is a scene where the hero dreams of a ballroom filled with all the loveliest women he’s tupped, in all his days. Ergo, a Fellini Room is a room containing, say, the top 20 most beautiful women you’ve ever swived. My Fellini Room, if I say so myself, and I do say so, especially now that my libido is dying and I need cheering up, is quite fantastic.
Clearly, I got a lot of sex. And that’s because I was fairly charming and fairly good-looking and sometimes funny and, mainly, really horny. This is where I need to describe what a very insistent male libido is like, because I genuinely believe people who have not experienced a truly fierce male libido have absolutely no conception.
Imagine you wake up starving. Every single day. Every morning is like a morning during an awful famine in February 1847. You are close to gnawing rat bones. Heck, you did that last night. You fear if you do not eat today you will die. Then you walk out and the world is full of beautiful food, strolling by.
As a very horny friend (also with a fading libido) recently put it to me: ‘When I really wanted sex there was nothing I could do, I simply had to have sex.’ In moments of total famine, he would seek out sex workers, as did I. As did Graham Greene, and he was Catholic.
All of which explains why my semi-liberation from my libido feels so very bittersweet. In one sense I am freed. It’s like recovering from a major and crippling mental illness that began when I was about 13. Now I can do other stuff. Grow succulents on my balcony. Do more things with turbot, or maybe hake. I can sit back and be wise, and laugh at the foolishness of the human comedy.
At the same time, something vital is dwindling away. Literally, my life force. Eros. And after Eros comes Thanatos. Not so keen on him. Also I have to look at myself through a new lens. I was once this alpha bloke who rumpled beds with hundreds of women. Now I am this guy who buys antique Delft tiles and gets excited by caperberries.
There is, however, a caveat to all this. I say semi-liberation from my libido because, at the time of writing, it is exactly that. My lust has definitely waned – but not entirely disappeared. And it’s not so much that it’s lessened, it’s more that it now comes and goes, like really bad wifi, or the Christian faith of an Anglican bishop. For a week or two I feel nothing, then suddenly for a day the beast is back, and I’m raging and 17 again. It is completely unpredictable, and messes with my solo cooking plans.
So, would I like the entire madness to return? In truth, no. I welcome the tranquillity, and it is more becoming at my age. Who wants a sixtysomething man acting like a teenager? However, it would be nice if I could have it back on loan, for, say, six predictable weeks a year. Until and unless that happens, I am consoling myself with the final lines of Betjeman’s ‘Senex’:
Oh whip the dogs away my Lord,
They make me ill with lust.
Bend bare knees down to pray, my Lord,
Teach sulky lips to say, my Lord,
That flaxen hair is dust.
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